


Let the Good Times Roll on Through These First Few Desperate Hours

by speccygeekgrrl



Series: lovers from the moon [16]
Category: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Genre: Breastfeeding, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Father-Daughter Relationship, Jonah has a weird time entertaining an hours-old infant, Kinga has doubts, Late Night Conversations, Max has superpowers, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Multi, Newborn Children, Or close enough anyways
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 22:34:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16819765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speccygeekgrrl/pseuds/speccygeekgrrl
Summary: Katalin was born just before 1 a.m., but even after the doctors clear out and the family gets to rest, no one gets to sleep clear through to sunrise this morning.





	Let the Good Times Roll on Through These First Few Desperate Hours

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry, there's not really much desperate about this, I just like using Mountain Goats lyrics as song titles.
> 
> I'm so fucking relieved that the baby being born is done so I can get back to this series being easy and fun to write.

Max’s eyes shot open and he blinked at the ceiling a couple of times before he realized what had woken him: not a full-throated cry, just a distressed whimper, and not from Kinga, but from their newborn daughter. As he got up to pick up the baby, he wondered if the hyperalertness he’d developed in responding to Kinga’s nightmares qualified as a superpower yet. Certainly keeping Katalin from waking her other parents was an act of lowkey heroism. “Shh, Daddy’s got you,” he crooned as he brought her back to the bed.

He almost didn’t want to wake Kinga up, exhausted as she was from eighteen hours of labor. The baby was only a few hours old, and he knew that on the other side of their curtains the sun hadn’t yet risen to mark her first day on Earth, but— she was hungry, and it was better for Kinga to wake with a hand on her shoulder than a shriek in her ear. 

“The princess requires your attention,” he murmured as he woke her up. She waved a hand at him, rolled onto her side and yawned, and then moved to sit up. 

“Give her,” she said, and Max huffed a laugh and passed her the baby, who eagerly latched on as soon as she was presented with a nipple. "I already regret making the decision to breastfeed exclusively," Kinga muttered, and Max gave her a wry look as he settled on the bed next to her again.

"You don't have to stick with it," he said. "If you want her to be bottle fed, we can start that whenever you're tired of being the sole food source."

"I can't give up this quickly." She looked down at their daughter and brushed one finger across her plump cheek. "It'll be fine, probably. You know I just like to complain."

"I know you like to sleep, too. No one's going to judge you. Or at least, Jonah and I won't."

"Yeah, well, your opinions are the only ones that matter anyways," she said, closing her eyes and resting her head on Max's shoulder. He tipped his head against hers and closed his eyes too. Jonah's intermittent snoring drowned out the soft gurgles the baby made as she sucked, and Kinga sighed quietly. “We… we can do this, right? We’re going to be okay at doing this?”

“It’s way too late to back out now, so we’d better be.” She gasped sharply, exhaled shakily, and he wrapped his arm more tightly around her. “No, no, of course we’re going to be okay at doing this, we’re going to be great parents.” He wondered how long it would take before the kind of joke she used to make constantly wouldn’t set her into tears again. It had been hard to navigate her sense of humor the past few months, laughter or tears starting off as equally likely before sharply tipping in favor of tears around the time they’d moved into their new home and she’d become stuck in it on doctor’s orders. “That’s why the three of us stuck together, right? So we’d all be better parents?” They both looked over at Jonah, snoring into his pillow, and Kinga’s breath hitched again. 

“That’s n-not… not the only reason.”

“And better world leaders?”

“Max…”

“We stuck together because we love each other,” he said, “but given the speed at which the rest of it fell into place once we’d all admitted that much out loud, I think they’re all valid reasons to cite.” 

“You were always going to be a great parent,” she said. “I’m not so sure about me.”

“I have the utmost faith in you.”

“You shouldn’t, given where I came from. My grandmother is… such a selfish woman. My father's a very selfish man. And I know that I can be selfish. But I… I don't want to be the kind of parent that either of them were. I don't want our daughter to go through what I went through. I want her to have too much love instead of not enough."

“You’re not your father. Or your grandmother. You’re Kinga. And I love you too much to let you lose yourself enough to behave like either of them as a parent.” 

“Promise?”

“Yes, dear, I promise not to let you emotionally scar our child.” The baby let go of Kinga’s breast and yawned, and Kinga looked down at her with a complicated expression on her face.

"Is it weird that I don't know how I feel right now?"

"No," Max said. "That's not weird at all. Do you not know because it's too many feelings, or do you not know because it's not a feeling?"

"I think it's too many of them. I'm happy but I still want to cry."

"I'd want to cry too if I were in your position. Waking up every three hours is a torture tactic that's not allowed under the Geneva Convention, I think."

"Yeah, but you're waking up with me," she pointed out.

"Yeah, but I wake up when you wake up in the middle of the night already anyways, and I have since we started sharing a bed."

"That's a fair point."

"I don't mind it, you know. I don't need uninterrupted sleep. And I want you and our little Kat to be as content as you can be." Kinga turned her head to kiss Max's cheek, and he turned to kiss her back. "Do you want anything? A glass of water or—"

"I'm all right." She sounded sleepy, starting to nod off already. Max nudged Kinga until she passed the baby to him, and then she curled up to Jonah's back and fell asleep again nearly instantaneously. Max got up and walked around the almost-dark bedroom with their daughter against his shoulder, gently patting the baby's back.

"Come on, kiddo. One little burp and then we can all go back to sleep." It took a couple of minutes for Katalin to get with the picture, which Max unabashedly spent huffing the top of her head and her wispy baby hair. He'd read about New Baby Smell being a thing, but it was even better than advertised. When she did burp, she also spat up all over his shoulder, and he wrinkled his nose. "And so begins the battle between my daughter and my germophobia," he intoned prophetically as he laid her down in her bassinet and covered her with a light blanket, then pulled off his t-shirt and tossed it in the laundry basket before getting back into bed. 

Jonah was the next one to wake up, prompted not by the baby fussing but by his bladder, and he came over to the bassinet to check on Katalin on his way back to bed to find her awake but quiet, baby blue eyes looking up at the mobile hung over her bed. That had been a compromise: Jonah had wanted the mobile to be cute robots, Max wanted it to be fantasy animals like dragons and unicorns, and Kinga wanted it to be real animals, and in the end they'd decided to buy all of them and switch them out every so often. They'd started with the real animals, and Katalin was determinedly lifting her chubby little hands up for the tiger.

"It's a tiger," Jonah said, and when he picked up the baby her chubby little hands reached for his face instead, far too short to make it to his face. "A tiger is a kind of cat, and so are you," he added quietly as he brought Katalin out to the living room. Digging one-handed through the toybox they'd been accumulating to find a soft stuffed tiger, he sat down on the couch and used the tiger to kiss his daughter's cheeks. "The tiger loves Kat!" 

The baby gurgled, and Jonah shook his head slightly. Newborns were weird, they couldn't really do anything, not even laugh. And he wasn't sure that Katalin would even find him funny. Who knew how much of what he was saying was even making it through to her? He still wasn't going to use a corny baby talk voice with her, though. "The tiger loves Kat, and so do Papa and Mama and Dada." Katalin caught the tiger with one hand and yanked it, and Jonah's brows shot up. "Hey, you've got a grip for someone who was born today."

The sun was up, if only barely, and Jonah had meant to go back to bed for at least a couple more hours, but for someone who couldn't do anything, Katalin was surprisingly interesting. Her eyes would follow the tiger toy when he moved it, so he danced it around and made up a story, and if the story involved the tiger eating a baby up, well, she wasn’t even a day old and wouldn't remember it. When she lost interest in the toy and started to cry, Jonah changed her diaper and she tipped back into contentment when he picked her up from the changing table and cuddled her to his chest.

"There they are," Max said, and Jonah tilted his head back to watch his husband approach the couch and bend to give him an upside-down kiss over the back of it. "Morning. How long have you been up?"

"I don't know, maybe an hour? Probably less than an hour." Max came around the couch to sit next to Jonah and Katalin, and he picked up the tiger toy with a smile. 

"I thought we weren't going to confuse her with Kat and cats."

"That's a lost cause, and she likes the tiger."

"Is that true? Are you already a big cat enthusiast?" Max made the tiger kiss her round cheek, and Kat waved her hands around. "Gosh, she's cute. And you're cute holding her," he added, making the tiger kiss Jonah's cheek as well. Jonah pursed his lips expectantly until Max gave him a proper kiss, and then he smiled.

"Cuteness is a transitive property."

"Oh, really?"

"Yeah. That's why pictures of the three of us together get called cute so much. You're extending your cuteness to me and Kinga."

"That sounds fake, but okay," Max said, and Kat kicked her legs and wiggled until he caught her feet between his fingers and bent down to blow a raspberry into her fat little leg, kissing her knee before he sat up again. "But we're really not going to be able to avoid being called cute now."

"Since when are we trying to avoid it? I thought we were rejoicing in it. We're the cutest world leaders."

"I thought Kinga was aiming for hottest world leaders."

"We're both," Jonah said. "I'm pretty sure we're both." Katalin started to fuss again, and Max watched her wriggle in Jonah's arms for a moment before he held out his arms to take her.

"She's hungry. I'll bring her to Kinga."

"How can you tell?"

"Look at her mouth, she wants something to latch onto. We're not supposed to give her a pacifier when she does this, we're supposed to feed her before the fussing becomes crying."

"Makes sense," Jonah said, and gave Max another kiss before standing up with the baby still in his arms. "I'll brave Kinga's wrath this time."

"Okay, but make sure you burp Kat before you put her back in the bassinet after she's done nursing. You want breakfast?"

"No, I'm going to sleep a little more. I only got up because Kat was awake."

"That's fair. I guess I'll peek in and check on you all every now and then, cause I'm awake for good for now." He looked significantly more awake than Jonah felt, that was for sure. "Love you," he added as Jonah turned away, and Jonah glanced over his shoulder with a grin.

"Love you too. Sure you don't want to come cuddle?"

"Maybe in a little while. I want to see how many likes Kinga's newborn photos got," Max said, and Jonah wasn't sure how joking he was from the smile on his face. "Go on, catch a few more Zs." Jonah didn't need to be told twice. He found Baby in the bassinet when he walked past it to settle next to Kinga on the bed.

"Kinga. Wake up, honey," he murmured, brushing a few loose strands of hair back from her face. 

"Hmm?" She swatted at his hand, then cracked open one eye to look at him. "Oh. All right, princess, come and get it." She piled up the pillows behind herself before taking Katalin in her arms with a mighty yawn that the baby imitated a moment later. "Huh, are yawns contagious to babies too?"

"Looks like it," Jonah said after yawning himself. He watched curiously as Kinga got the baby settled on her breast, and she gave him a sleepy but sardonic look. "What? I'm not allowed to be interested in how breastfeeding works?"

"As long as you're not ogling my mommy boobs."

"I mean, they look great, but that's not the point. The point is Katalin being fed."

"You're damn right it is." Jonah huffed a laugh and stretched out next to Kinga and Kat, resting his head against Kinga's hip, and Kinga ran her fingers through his hair gently. "Thanks for bringing her to me."

"Of course. Need anything?"

"Just for you to hold me," she said, and he wrapped an arm around her legs and settled in for an extended cuddle.


End file.
